


Again

by suzume_tori



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Character Death Fix, M/M, Post Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-27
Updated: 2009-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-28 15:55:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suzume_tori/pseuds/suzume_tori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Endtimes happened, but Shinji chose to create the new, 'normal' reality he'd dreamed of. Except that bad memories have a habit of creeping in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Again

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is a random fic that I had begun to type out (in notepad, no less) several months ago. I'm probably not going to finish it, since I can't remember where I was going with it. (My notes to myself must have made sense at the time, but they look to me now like weird metaphors for plants.)
> 
> In your mind, imagine that they live happily ever after. Here, it's getting towards ever after, but isn't happy yet. (But that's where it was going to go. I promise.)

"I've done this before."

The cellist set his bow across the lip of the music stand and propped the neck of the cello against the tall back of the chair. "It must have been when I was younger -- but I think we used it to warm up." A mental snapshot of pale, worn music-books ('Suzuki: beginner level exercises for Cellos") flickered from beneath cobwebby layers of more recent memories.

"What part of you remembers?" Kaworu questioned, standing to the side with his own instrument in hand. "Your mind? Your fingers?" His pale left-hand shot out to wrap around Shinji's wrist, pulling it flush against the palm of his own right-hand. "How much of you keeps it? How much do you keep?"

Shinji let the questions roll off his back; a few days of the other boy's company had been enough to inure him to the odd questions and mannerisms; the stranger ones seemed to require no response in order to satisfy Kaworu. Kaworu's oddities made things... socially uncomfortable, but not unbearably so, like now -- when the albino was raptly staring at the the junction of their hands where he'd brought them together -- like he was seeing something new and fascinating in the whorls and divots of Shinji's hands.

"Does the memory of the song make you happy?" Kaworu questioned, face open and bright with his own odd brand of tenderness.

"I -- It's just a song. I don't know. I guess I'm glad I remember it, but I don't really play it any more, so it wouldn't matter if I forgot it. I could just look it up and learn it again." Shinji broke their connection, shoving his hands into his pockets. Kaworu's friendliness was shining and invasive -- it made him instinctively hunch his shoulders, hunkering down under the assault of unfamiliar familiarity.

"What song makes you the most happy? Have you ever forgotten that song?" Kaworu shouldered his instrument case, waiting for Shinji to finish gathering up the sheet music from their shared stand.

Shinji paused, brow furrowing.

"Ode to Joy. I've forgotten it at least once -- when my teacher was going over it the first time, I was playing bits of it, so I know I must have learned it before somewhere. It's a very... it's a happy song, I guess." Shinji frowned, "At least, I think it is. The first time I played it all the way through, though, I think I wanted to cry." Shinji's nose crinkled slightly in an endearingly puzzled expression.

A song is good. Mankind (lilim's) greatest achievement. Brings us joy. It is a good song to learn again.

 

* * *

 

A sticky, web-like substance was sloughing off the two aliform protrusions that marred the surface of the pale, fine-boned back.

Shinji wanted to press Kaworu to see a doctor but -- everything was just so WRONG. Thoughts fell out of his head - he was hyperfocused on the surreal experience of being present to what appeared to be a bizarre metamorphosis.

"Like a butterfly," he heard himself mumble, his own voice tinny and far away, "Comes out beautiful, but no longer a caterpillar."

Whatever Kaworu was, he was no longer an Ordinary Boy.

Ordinary was important to Shinji - but never as important as the extraordinaire. Gendo required the extraordinary -- an ordinary son was not worth his attention. It wasn't until it had come to light that Shinji might have some unforeseen purpose -- a pilot, useful in Gendo's unique line of work -- that he had regained any sort of worth in his fathers' eyes. If being a pilot meant that he was weird, or despised, or unable to be anything but different -- well, he had done it with the hopes that being extraordinary would work where adherence to normality had failed.

He had learned to pilot an Evangelion, which was by no means an unimpressive feat.

He had learned to live with disappointment and inattention, as well. This second lesson had been harder.

 

* * *

 

Kaworu's hands were soft - no calluses to mark the use of a pencil or joystick or even the Evangelions' toylike target-and-trigger system. His hands had no story -- they were the hands of someone without a past.

Looking back, Shinji often thought of great, LC tanks -- an ocean of Ayanamis smiling mindlessly (meaninglessly) out at him. They would never emerge to develop any kind of quirks or scars or calluses or anything to mark their bodies as their own -- they were all part of a chain. (Ritsuka had seen that. She'd broken the chain -- for the wrong reasons, though there were reasons enough that were good. Was it the intention or the consequences that mattered? Shinji was never sure.)

When going over details in his mind, Shinji liked to imagine a dummy plug with extra Kaworus, all smiling like second chances out at him. Ritsuka would have no call to destroy them.

Only Shinji could destroy him, and he'd done it once. He wouldn't -- he *couldn't* -- do it again.

Kaworu had been wrong.

Humanity wasn't worth this. They were a scab on the surface of the earth, growing and festering at the edges to pollute everything around them.

An angel's head, laying in something like amniotic fluid -- something like primordial soup -- was like a rootless stem in a bowl of water. It had nothing with which to draw up the things it needed.


End file.
